Ive been playing Metro Last Light. The Metro series is one of the best new FPS game series out there. Very well done. Its not a twitch shooter like Doom or Quake but just enough of a shooter/story to be good.

Anyway, since May I have been trying to bash my way through Torchlight II due to the fact that at the time it appeared to be a good mindless time sink for me when things were not going so good, but I must admit now that I have reached Act III that the grinding really does start to get repetitive and dull after awhile:

To that end I have found myself relapsing to play F.E.A.R. 2 again and have now started another campaign of SiN Gold:

I am enjoying SiN more on my second playthrough than I did on my first.

The game improves once the Mercs arrive and you get your hands on the more powerful weapons, but the early stealth sections are awful. Any game that needs to place an artificial restriction on you to ensure that you sneak through an area you would otherwise be able to easily blast through needs to reexamine its priorities. Especially when your best option upon sneaking through that area is the go back and shoot the place up in order to get your hands on additional supplies, not to mention to recover the health you lost when the alarm unavoidably went off and you were ducking and diving fire.

And I am pretty sure I missed quite a few of the vehicle sections later in the game. Meh, they always feel like cheating anyway.

So I seem to be running the gamut of lacklustre early 2000's FPS games. Just picked up Chaser for $2.09 CAD.

Yet more crappy stealth sections and oftentimes clunky gunplay. Chaser reminds me of the on-foot segments of Shogo in a way due to its tactic of forcing you to take on loads of almost identical weak hitscan enemies that nevertheless are capable of dealing significant damage. The main difference being that Shogo had charm, which Chaser lacks. Production values are also all over the place, with most of the focus seemingly being placed on long elaborate cutscenes while the rest of the game suffers from a lack of attention to detail. I was even able to jump off the map in one level. Interestingly the game featured a bullet time mechanic only a few years before F.E.A.R. did the exact same thing. What undermines it here though is that your own weapon also slows down substantially. Nothing sucks more than having to watch your character reload in slow motion.